The 2011 Fabulous Fifty Blog Awards...Ahem

What a great way to start the New Year!

Over at Doug Ross’ blog he features an annual "best of", this one being his Top Fifty Blog Awards. For 2011, in the “Golda Meir Award for Best Anti-Jihad Blogger” category, Gates of Vienna tied with three other worthies. Our compatriots were Atlas Shrugs, Jihad Watch, and Memri. [Hey, maybe we’ll start getting the big money, too? From this keyboard to G-d’s eyes, please. Our donors would be most grateful.]

Take a look at some of the other groupings. What a hoot! Mixed in with the more serious categories, he has these political in-jokes:

• The David Brooks Award for Demi-Conservatism
  
• The David Frum Award for Faux Conservatism
  
• The Jennifer Rubin Award for Pseudo-Conservatism

There are also winners of substance. The Foundry, for example. If I were well, you’d hear about them (see the link at the awards post, under “Best U.S. Econ Blog”). And Fausta won the best in her category. Americans in general ignore South America — to our loss now and to our eventual peril.

If you don’t read Director Blue on a regular basis, you’re missing some entertainment. His take on the news is light but never trivial. For example, on the home page there are two large charts worth viewing:

The first one is obviously of personal concern to The Baron and me since it displays the sad decline in U.S. employment numbers. Doug Ross calls it “The Most Terrifying Economic Chart of 2011”. We call it daily life in the slow lane.

As he points out, the angle of the dangle of U.S. unemployment levels increased markedly as soon as Obama ascended the throne began his reign term of office. From that point forward (or downward) the line began plunging and hasn’t looked up since. Smell them smokin’ brakes? Given our fearless leader’s congenital hostility to private enterprise I hope he has government workers busily placing sandbags at the bottom of that plunge because those numbers will never come back until it looks safe again to do business here.

The second chart in that post is linked to the first: the numbers of people now on food stamps. He says:

…please note the coincidental rise in food stamps and government assistance at the exact same time; free money to stay unemployed, dispensed with leaf-blower-like efficiency throughout the country…

At the moment, thanks to our donors we are not on food stamps. But then again, we never will be. When there is no longer enough income from blogging and assorted editing jobs, the Baron will engage in local money-making activities. Yes, they will be legal endeavors. Things like substitute teaching or tutoring. He is an old hand at surviving in lean times; we remember them when he was a landscape artist and did odd jobs like being a Kelly Girl. [No doubt that company has long since changed its name.]

[Anyone unemployed and raising children would do well to consider food stamps as a stop-gap measure. We never had to do so, but where children are concerned an adequate diet is crucial for optimal brain and bone growth.]

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *
I will always be grateful to Doug Ross for keeping the flame for Larwyn, since she can no longer send out her mass mail aggregations. I still miss them, and even more I miss her wonderful sense of humor. She liked all of us, despite our sins. In Linx today, see this letter from George Washington to Barack Obama. The author took careful pains to imitate the rhetoric of Washington’s time. It is a worthy effort. Extending the metaphor of America as a garden, he describes her current condition in sad detail. Here is just one snip of that long lament:

Our Garden is become a tangled bed of weeds and thorns as those of your school have beggared the working man, and stood as highwayman to the banker and merchant. Our system of public education is like unto an academy for the teaching of treason, and a university for the manufacture of a large class of impertinent mendicants for whom the taxpayers must serve as unwilling almoners in perpetuity. And you strive, through cunning and secret stratagems, to disarm the people, thereby subjecting them to the caprice of an all-powerful central government, in one stroke imposing tyranny and depriving the citizenry of the capacity for resisting it.

I like the fine, high rhetorical style he assumes here. Definitely he’s worth a visit, but don’t get lost like I did.

Welcome 2012. And thank you, Director Blue. What a wonderful way to end an otherwise annus horribilis!

Meanwhile, for our readers who love to be filled with fear and loathing, who enjoy their schadenfreude with whipped cream and cataclysms, there’s always the purported Mayan predictions for 2012. A nice distraction, no?